Wired with Epic Magazine

FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING

In “Love in the Time of Robots,” Alex Mar profiles Hiroshi Ishiguro, fifty-four, “a distinguished professor at one of the country’s top universities, with two labs, partnerships with a dozen private companies throughout Japan, a recent $16 million grant from the government (one of its most generous in science and engineering, he says), and seven secretaries to manage it all.” Or in the words of the Ellie judges, “an eccentric visionary who has spent a lifetime building androids, each more complex and human-like than its predecessor.” This beautifully written story addresses the moral quandaries posed by artificial intelligence. “A meditation on human intimacy and loneliness in the twenty-first century,” continued the judges, “it is both unnerving and unforgettable.” Alex Mar’s first book, Witches in America, explored the occult. Now at work on her second book, she also directed the documentary American Mystic.